Work Text:
“OH CUZ!” Janet cried as Arnold committed suicide by removing his helmet when they were on Pluto. The memory of her cousin literally freezing himself to death on Pluto burned itself into her memory and she had dreams relating to it every single night. She would sometimes drink energy drinks at night to keep herself up but to no avail. She would still find a way to sleep anyway. Right after they had landed Miss Frizzle had the nerve to make a fully functioning clone of Arnold and sweep the death of their classmate under the rug. But Janet knew this whole time. This was why she did not attend anymore of Miss Frizzle’s classes after the space episode.
Janet wished she could endlessly pump herself full of ketamine just so that she wouldn’t be in this endless funk. But in the end she decided against it because drugs are bad, m’kay. Well actually it’s not drugs themselves that are bad, it’s the abuse of them. Like anything in life, really.
I have to go back to Pluto and turn it into a greenhouse. Give it some of that good ol global warming. But first I need to steal the Magic School Bus.
One day during lunch (today's lunch was scorpion pizza) she snuck out of the cafeteria and into Miss Frizzle’s desk and stole the keys to the Magic School Bus.
With them in hand she left the building and out to the parking lot where the titular bus was parked.
She turned on the engine and realized she did not quite think this through, as the control panel looked more complicated than abstract Algebra word problems.
She opened the glove compartment and pulled out the manual, which was over 2,000 pages long. She opened up to the table of contents and realized it was way too daunting to be able to find any individual thing, so she opened up near the back to the glossary. Hopefully there was a greater chance of finding what she was looking for there than tediously sifting through the table of contents. At last she found “spaceship transformation” on page 445. How to transform the bus into a spaceship was a clearly labeled diagram that was intuitive enough for even a mere student to follow. She followed it to a T and the bus underwent its transformation into a spaceship. This was also accompanied by a section on how to operate the bus while it’s in spaceship mode.
She set her sights on Pluto.
“Time to take my revenge on you for killing my cousin,” she said angrily thru gritted teeth.
Dodging several asteroids on the way, she made it to Pluto. Once she landed, she transformed the bus back into the default school bus form and let the engine idle. Given that Pluto was much smaller than Earth surely it shouldn’t take nearly as much greenhouse gases as earth, right? But then again the amount of distance from the sun compared to Earth might skew that number quite a bit.
“Be right back.” Janet transported herself back to the asteroid belt to extract raw materials to then take back to Pluto, where she started work on making her very own factory. Specifically a cookie factory. One that could bake millions of cookies per second. She loved cookies. Possibly more than ketamine. Who needs ketamine when cookies are a perfect substitute? She thought. Her cookie factory was coal-powered. All future cookie factories would be coal-powered too.
Janet constructed a second cookie factory. And a third. And a fourth. Eventually she made enough factories to cover the surface of the planet (it is still a planet in the Magic School Bus universe). But according to the bus’s rearview mirror the temperature reading still read an amount of degrees that was waaaay under sub-zero. “Imma have to convert these cookie factories into factory factories,” she said to herself. Rather than baking cookies the factories were now making their own cookie factories. She admired her handiwork.
“I may not be able to bring Arnold back to life but I can prevent anyone else from being able to freeze to death by taking off their space helmet on the surface of this planet.” The temperature on the thermometer on the bus’s rearview mirror actually started to climb a couple degrees. To speed this up even further she decided to build some coal-powered AI data centers too. The exponential rise in factories and AI data centers was having an effect despite the immeasurable distance from the sun. All the frozen bodies of liquid were starting to melt. When the temperature had climbed to 33 degrees F, Janet decided to remove her helmet. She did not freeze.
“YIPEE KI YAY!” she shouted.
Several decades later Elon Musk made his own Magic School Bus design known as the Cyberbus, which he used to terraform every planet in the solar system due to the previous ones becoming too much affected by climate change. After a heated debate on whether to terraform Pluto or not because “is it a planet or not?” he decided to make it out there.
“Oh looks like someone did our work for us by causing global warming to happen on Pluto. Well, IDK what more planet we can inhabit. Unless this Cyberbus can transform into a Death Star.” A few button presses later the Cyberbus transformed into a Death Star. Tired of the endless debates about whether or not Pluto is a planet he decided to destroy Pluto with it. Elon’s Death Star was now officially the 9th planet in the solar system.
